How Marco Rubio Wants to Help Trump Take Down the ICC

The Trump administration wants to dismantle the International Criminal Court.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a video message to X Monday saying that the ICC has turned into something “radical and extreme” and that the U.S. will now target the court.

“As we speak, the ICC and its friends are waging a war against our ​country, not with bullets and missiles but ​with statutes, compacts, and the force of ⁠so-called international law,” Rubio said in the video.

In addition to the post, Rubio wrote an op-ed column for The Wall Street Journal accusing the court and its allies of seeking “a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states—and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.

“The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.,” Rubio’s column added.

Reuters spoke to an anonymous State Department official who said that the Trump administration is considering a variety of tactics, including travel bans, visa revocations, increased sanctions against the ICC and its affiliates, and diplomatic pressure on countries to withdraw from the ICC.

“No diplomatic option will be off-limits in the campaign ​to dismantle the threat posed by the ICC to Americans,” the State Department said in a statement.

The U.S. has never been a member of the ICC, and President Trump attacked the court after it issued arrest warrants against Israeli government leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Since then, the U.S. has sanctioned court officials and prosecutors, as well as other international leaders who document and speak out about Israel’s crimes, including United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese.

The Trump administration’s new push is not only based on support for Israel (whose Gaza massacre was largely conducted with American weapons) but also on the possibility of ICC charges being issued against the U.S. During Trump’s second term, the U.S. has launched strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which it claims are bringing drugs to the U.S.

In effect, the administration sees the ICC as a threat to its ability to launch military activities around the world whenever it wants, and as a threat to Israel. Trump and Rubio think that the U.S. is above any international criticism and checks on its military power, war crimes be damned.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has announced that he will vote against Representative Thomas Massie’s measure to cut off all aid to Israel—even though it’s a policy that the vast majority of Democratic voters agree with.

“I will be voting no on Republican Amendment #8.… It is overly broad in that it prohibits or would limit the use of funds for longstanding initiatives related to humanitarian aid, refugee resettlement, peace-building and U.S. Embassy operations,” Jeffries wrote in a letter to his Democratic colleagues Tuesday. “In addition, the so-called Massie amendment would restrict our country’s ability to confront Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations in the region who are sworn enemies of both the United States and Israel. In my view, there are more decisive ways to achieve the urgent change necessary when it comes to the far-right Netanyahu government.”

In his letter, Jeffries noted that the liberal organization J Street also opposed the measure. In response, the Jewish group hedged its opposition, saying it supports Jeffries’s position while also respecting that he won’t whip against the measure. The group suggested that Democrats could vote “no, present or yes” to reflect their concerns about “the way American military assistance and American-supplied weapons have been used by the Israeli government in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and elsewhere.”

Jeffries opposed the amendment while mentioning that the U.S. and Israel need a “new security arrangement” that would “undergird the maintenance of Israel’s qualitative military edge against Iran and other malign actors in the region.”

Dozens of Democrats are expected to vote for the amendment, which would be attached to the spending bill.

Jeffries’s letter reveals the ideological gap between party leadership and the party’s base. The second-most-powerful Democrat in the country thinks that cutting off aid to Israel—which has been committing a genocide against Palestinians for nearly three years—is too extreme, and that the problem lies solely with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not the decades of apartheid that preceded his nonconsecutive 20 years in leadership.

This isn’t just coming from congressional Democrats. California Governor and 2028 presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom refused to call Israel an apartheid state and doubled down on his support for Israel in an interview with Axios on Monday. And even Democratic Representative Ro Khanna—who was just held at gunpoint by Israeli settlers on his trip to the West Bank—stopped short of calling for a full embargo against the Israeli government.

“Inexcusable moral failure by the ‘opposition’ party leadership,” Middle East analyst Omar Baddar wrote on X. “If a genocide (sniper bullets in the heads of toddlers, systematically murdered medics & journalists, rape of prisoners … etc.) isn’t a red line, then what the hell is?!”

Donald Trump has finally paid E. Jean Caroll.

The columnist has received $5,625,000 from a court-controlled trust, according to court documents filed Tuesday.

The distribution of funds comes more than three years after Trump was found civilly liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a department store in late 1995.

“Three years ago, a unanimous nine-person jury found President Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, told CBS News. “Today, we are pleased to report that she has received the damages payment the jury awarded her as a result of that verdict.”

After many legal challenges, Judge Lewis Kaplan (who shares no relation to Carroll’s attorney) decided last week that Carroll should receive the money, despite yet another pending appeal from Trump’s team on the Supreme Court docket. The Supreme Court had originally declined to hear Trump’s petition on June 29. That day, Carroll wrote on her Substack: “THIS WIN IS FOR EVERY WOMAN IN THE WORLD!”

In a six-page memorandum penned Wednesday, Judge Kaplan noted that Trump “has been stalling this case for years.”

“It is time for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgement,” Kaplan ordered.

The aggregate payment consists of $5 million owed from the original case, along with an additional $625,000 in interest. Yet it’s really just the tip of the iceberg for how much Trump owes the beleaguered writer.

After the 2023 civil case, Trump tried and failed to sue Carroll for defamation. Kaplan later ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the sexual abuse on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the sexual assault allegations against him for the benefit of her book.

A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case, though Carroll has not yet seen any proceeds from that decision.

This story has been updated.

Even Republican lawmakers are beginning to doubt Senator Mitch McConnell’s recent health update.

Speaking with Real America’s Voice’s Eric Bolling on Monday, MAGA Senator Ron Johnson suggested that the image circulated by McConnell’s office was not actually taken that day.

“I’ve just heard from some other sources that was an older photo. So I really don’t know,” Johnson said. “I haven’t talked to Mitch—I certainly wish he and his family well, I hope he can recover. Listen, it’s sad to watch people age, no matter who that person is.”

The Kentucky senator went missing for nearly a month, with little explanation offered by his office, after he was found unconscious in his Washington residence and rushed to the hospital on June 14. The media blackout finally ended on Sunday, when McConnell’s office shared a photo of the lawmaker beside his wife, holding a copy of The Washington Post’s Sunday sports section in his lap.

In a statement released by McConnell’s office alongside the image, the lawmaker explained several things that had not happened to him—including that he didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion, and he hadn’t had a heart attack or stroke—rather than what had. The 84-year-old Republican did not offer any clarification on his current health condition, other than to say he had dealt with a “mild case of pneumonia” during his time in the hospital.

He also did not offer a projection for when he might return to work, noting that he has since been moved to a rehabilitation facility and is still “working closely” with legislative staff.

Far-right influencers immediately jumped on McConnell’s statement, baselessly suggesting that the picture had been AI-generated while demanding that McConnell release a video statement to address public concern.

Johnson, however, changed his tune within hours of the broadcast.

“It was a rumor. Just discount it,” Johnson told reporters. “I have no idea. I just, I heard that. I just heard it. So just assume it’s false.”

In a post on X, Johnson urged people to “beware of clickbait” and “watch the full clip.”

“Most importantly, I hope @SenMcConnell makes a full recovery and returns to the Senate,” he added.

An aide to Lindsey Graham called emergency services shortly before he died Saturday, after the South Carolina senator told her he was experiencing chest pains, according to a fellow GOP lawmaker.

Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama provided new information about Graham’s unexpected death to reporters Monday evening.

A woman who worked as Graham’s scheduler, and who had previously been Tuberville’s scheduler, received a phone call from the South Carolina Republican Saturday night. While Tuberville did not identify the scheduler, a staffer named Taylor Stephens was the scheduling director for the late senator, and previously held the same role in Tuberville’s office.

Graham called her, Tuberville recounted, and “basically he said, ‘Listen, I’m having chest pains. I need to do something.’ The scheduler asked if Graham had called 911. He goes, ‘No, that’s the reason I called you.’”

The woman, who had been at a restaurant with a current staffer of Tuberville’s, then contacted emergency services before going to Graham’s residence, where emergency personnel had “knocked the door down, and they were working on him.”

The information elucidates the events of the senator’s death by “aortic dissection due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease,” per his office. Previously, outlets including Fox News reported that the 911 call was made after 8 p.m. Saturday for cardiac arrest. About 25 minutes after the first dispatch, emergency personnel were reportedly conducting CPR.